Part 1: Hurricanes Make Me Hungry
With a monster storm brewing, I simmered a big pot of Italian chickpea soup.
The incoming blizzard put me in mind of another superstorm, Sandy, and a delicious, hearty soup I made as the hurricane approached. Below is an excerpt about cooking my way through that weather event while thinking about another powerful (and sometimes tempestuous) Sandy, my mom.
Sandy unleashes her fury.
That’s what I heard on TV, in a teaser for the 11 o’clock news, as Mark and I watched the Detroit Tigers play the San Francisco Giants in Game Three of the World Series on October 27, 2012.
My mother’s name was Sandy. And hurricanes were always a big thing for our family, since we had that vulnerable little stucco cottage on an ever-eroding spit of seashore.
One of my clearest early-childhood memories is of waking up at the beach one morning and coming downstairs to witness my father on the other side of the window wearing a pair of faded blue swim trunks, hammering planks over the glass as the wind whipped around him.
I always had a bit of extreme-weather anxiety, which got worse for a time when Rex was a baby. By my mid 40s, though, that had subsided, and I tended to hope for a storm that would be dramatic enough to keep the kids home from school—board games, anyone?—and uneventful enough to cause at most minimal damage.
There must be a primitive instinct in times of stress or danger to add an extra layer of fat for protection against a potentially less abundant future. It had to be primitive instinct that compelled me, as the storm gained strength over the Atlantic, to lay in a food supply for the four of us that included three pounds of stew meat and a veritable ton of sauerkraut, smoked pork chops, and sausages for choucroute garnie. That night, not yet in full-blown bunker mode, we’d had big bowls of Italian chickpea soup with cabbage, which I served with hearty chunks of toasted bread.
But back to Sandy.
“Do you think she’s still that pissed?” I texted my sister while watching the weather report between innings.
“No shit!” Karen wrote back.
After our mother died two years earlier, my sister and I had done our best, selling Mom’s apartment through a respected friend of the family and her Connecticut cottage to the next-door neighbor who clearly had the most love for the place and its charming-if-eroding waterfront surroundings. Still, we wondered and worried about whether she would have approved.
Mom had not been ready to go. She was mad. When Hurricane Irene struck after she died, soon after we’d sold the beach house, it sent a tall tree crashing down onto the house’s roof. Coincidence? Perhaps.
Now as “Perfect-Storm Sandy,” as the meteorologists were calling it, approached the coast from both east and west, and the full moon threatened to swell tides to their highest point in history, I wanted to imagine that our Sandy was looking down thinking, “Good job, girls.” But honestly, given our mother’s—shall-we-say—opinionated tendencies, there was no way to be sure.
What I did know was that if she’d still been around, she would have wanted nothing more than to hunker down in her house, fierce and fearless as always, taunting Karen and me for not being there with her while slurping glasses of prosecco and a bowl of something fortifying, like my Italian chickpea soup.
On that late October night in 2012, watching baseball with Mark while the kids slept upstairs and Hurricane Sandy set a path for Atlantic City, I still liked to think that nothing really bad could happen, as long as I’d laid in a supply of the good stuff.